Abstract
Does mere passage of time have causal powers? Are properties like “being n days past” causally efficient? A pervasive intuition among metaphysicians seems to be that they don’t. Events and/or objects change, and they cause or are caused by other events and/or objects; but one does not see how just the mere passage of time could cause any difference in the world. In this paper, I shall discuss a case where it seems that mere passage of time does have causal powers: Sydney Shoemaker’s (1969) possible world where temporal vacua (allegedly) take place. I shall argue that Shoemaker’s thought-experiment doesn’t really aim at teaching us that there can be time without change, but rather that if such a scenario is plausible at all (as I think it is) it provides us with good reasons to think that mere passage of time can be directly causally efficient.
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Notes
When it comes to the controversy between relationism and substantivalism (absolutism) about time, it is often argued that only substantivalism, but not relationism, is compatible with a global freeze. I show this to be incorrect in Benovsky (2011). Both views are equally compatible with a period of global freeze.
I mean : in addition to the state of the universe at the very last instant before a global freeze starts.
In a different article, Shoemaker (1980, p. 110) says that “a property is genuine if and only if its acquisition or loss by a thing constitutes a genuine change in that thing”. In this definition, “genuine” lies on both sides of the biconditional, so it does not provide us with a good lead to understand why a property would count as genuine or not, unless it would beg the question against A-properties by claiming that they cannot be responsible for genuine change—which is precisely the point at issue.
One of the anonymous referees of this journal rightly stressed the important question concerning how the mere passage of time can be responsible for a release of a global freeze. Here, I think one might embrace an argumentative strategy close to Shoemaker’s own concerning the very possibility of a global freeze. Indeed, Shoemaker does not provide a direct (positive) argument (reason) in favour of the possibility of a global freeze; rather his argumentative strategy is indirect: his argument is something like an argument from the best explanation. My strategy in this paper, regarding the possibility of causal efficiency of passage of time, is similar in this respect. The situation is the following: when there is a global freeze, there is nothing that can cause its end except the passage of time. The passage of time is the only thing that’s left to account for the end of the freeze. Thus, I conclude: it must be it, since nothing else is available. In this way, I do not show how passage of time is responsible for the end of the global freeze, rather I show that it is the most reasonable assumption in the neighbourhood to suppose that it does so. This is then an indirect argumentative strategy as well.
I would like to thank Jonathan Lowe for an insightful discussion about my first ideas for this article, as well as two anonymous referees and the Editor of this journal for very useful comments which helped me to improve the final version.
References
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Benovsky, J. The Causal Efficiency of the Passage of Time. Philosophia 40, 763–769 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-012-9365-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-012-9365-6